


Triptych

by within_a_dream



Category: We Know the Devil (Visual Novel)
Genre: F/F, Multi, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 14:25:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12459654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/pseuds/within_a_dream
Summary: A look at three ways things could have gone after the game ends





	1. Jupiter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Inkyrius](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkyrius/gifts).



> Many thanks to telm_393 for betaing!

It feels weird to hang out alone, just Venus and Neptune. There’s an empty space between them that they sometimes acknowledge and sometimes don’t, but it’s there whether they mention it or not.

Jupiter doesn’t answer either of their texts.

They spend a lot of time in the park by Neptune’s house. Neptune doesn’t want Venus over for reasons she doesn’t want to talk about. Venus doesn’t want Neptune over because his parents are assholes. So they sit in a tree in the park until the sun goes down, talking about things only the two of them (and Jupiter, still MIA) understand.

It seems vital to remember. It’s so easy to let the sticky, sweaty summer days and the press of hands and the way the snap of a hairband echoes through a muggy silence fade away, now that they’re back at school and the air is getting colder and they can pretend they’re not the worst kids there. But they came face-to-face with the devil, the devil took one of their own, and that was important, even if that one of their own hadn’t answered their texts or come to school since they all came home.

It still feels weird to be together without Jupiter, but by the time the leaves turn Neptune and Venus are more like actual-friends than forced-together-by-sucky-circumstances-friends.

“Venus, you’re the only boy I’ve ever gotten along with,” Neptune says one day, when the air feels crisp and ready for confessions.

“Um…I don’t think I am. A boy, I mean.” Venus fidgets, looking a little like a puppy expecting to be kicked.

Instead of kicking her, Neptune laughs. She can’t get any words out for a while. “Oh my God,” she says when she can finally talk again, “that explains so much.”

Venus bites her lip. “It does?”

“Like how I don’t want to punch you in the face every time you talk. Like how I kind of want to kiss you.”

“You wouldn’t rather kiss Jupiter?”

It’s a shock, hearing her feelings out there in the open like that. But Venus knows her better than anyone else ever has, and Venus has enough of her own secrets to be good at spotting other people’s.

_ How did you know _ , she doesn’t ask, and  _ Does anyone else know _ . “You can want to kiss more than one person at once,” she says instead.

“Not at the same time, I hope,” Venus says, wrinkling her nose the way she only does when she’s joking. “That would get crowded. One person’s lips are only so big.”

“I take it back about not wanting to punch you in the face.”

 

Over winter break, Jupiter starts a group chat. She leads with  _ Hey. Sorry for disappearing. _ and then invites them both over.

Venus responds with a message that gets broken into 6 parts due to length limits. Neptune sends  _ Missed you, asshole. _

 

It seems like Jupiter should fit seamlessly back into the equation. She’s been a ghost between Venus and Neptune for months, and being together should feel effortless.

It doesn’t.

They sit on Jupiter’s bed with the bedroom door open and her parents both hovering outside, and they talk about nothing. No one mentions the bottle of pills on Jupiter’s dresser, or the red scar that lashed across her wrist where they’d seen her hairband snap last summer.

“I’ve been studying from home, but I’m coming back to school in January.” She jerks her hand towards her wrist, like she meant to snap the hair tie that was no longer there, and shifts to stroking the scar with her thumb. “Thanks for coming over. My parents worry about me, you know?”

Neptune looks out at the hallway, where Jupiter’s mother is trying very hard to look like she’s just passing through on her way to the master bedroom, and stands up. “We’re going on a walk.”

 

They end up back at the park, all three of them up a tree. There are things Neptune wants to say that she couldn’t while they were being watched, things about how much she missed Jupiter and what  _ Jupiter’s _ missed while Venus and Neptune spent the fall together, and how much Neptune wanted to kiss both of them.

Neptune and Venus end up kissing Jupiter, and it’s not too crowded after all.


	2. Neptune

Every night, for weeks after Neptune comes home, she wakes up feeling waterlogged and frozen to the bone. When she shuts her eyes, she remembers being laid out on a tarp, every bad thought she’d ever had draining out of her in a viscous stream. She remembers Jupiter and Venus’s words poking at her ears, not quite managing to break through. She remembers her own words catching like tar in her mouth, oozing across her tongue and leaving nothing but bitterness behind.

She doesn’t tell her parents what happened. The camp doesn’t tell them either, which surprises her. Then again, who wants to be the one to tell parents who sent their kids off to be better that their daughter was the devil?

She almost doesn’t tell anyone. Better to keep it to herself, to forget the oozing and the coughing and the way her own badness rises like bile in her throat when she lets her thoughts catch up with her. But everyone is so worried, and Neptune’s never been one to tell people she’s fine when she’s not. Hide it behind jokes, sure, but she doesn’t lie about being happy when the world and her life are giant sacks of shit.

She tries to keep it to texts. Easier to pretend you’re just kidding when everything’s only in writing, easy to blame typos or a joke that fell flat. But Venus and Jupiter won’t leave her alone (Neptune can’t tell if she’s grateful to them for that, or if she hates them for it.) They’re oh-so-concerned, and meeting up in person only amplifies that.  _ Neptune, are you sure you’re all right? Neptune, you know we’re here for you, right? Neptune, you know you can tell us anything?  _ Serves them right if she did.

So it all comes out. You can call yourself bad all you want, but that doesn’t stop the scope of that badness from rising up sometimes and choking you. It’s so easy to just let it pour out, drench Jupiter and Venus in all their well-meaning with every horrible thing she’s ever felt.

“You’re not bad,” Jupiter says after her tirade, snapping her hairband against her wrist.

“Yeah fucking right.”

“You’re not any worse than us,” Venus says. “We all could have been the devil. You just fell into it first.”

Neptune smirks. “That’s sweet and all, Venus, but you weren’t the one draining on a tarp last August. You actually try to be good, which puts you about a thousand steps ahead of me. And don’t even start, Jupiter, you try harder than I ever have in my life.”

“I don’t want to, though,” Jupiter whispers. “I don’t think either of us want to anymore. I want to touch you, and be touched by you, and kiss you, and stop being so good.”

“I don’t know if I want to kiss you or be you more,” Venus adds, and it comes out like a confession, one that clicks a few things into place.

“That just makes me worse. I corrupted you.” Neptune laughs—can’t let the mood get too dark. “Apparently I didn’t corrupt you enough if you’re trying to make me feel better by pitying me with your stupid saccharine declarations of love.”

“That wasn’t a pity confession.” Jupiter leans in to kiss her, looking surer than Neptune’s ever seen her. “And that wasn’t a pity kiss,” she says as she pulls away.

“This isn’t a pity kiss either,” Venus says, and then edges forward to press her lips to Neptune’s. After she pulls away, she adds, “Sometimes a kiss is just a kiss.”

“And sometimes,” Jupiter says, toying with the hairband around her wrist, “your friends have had a mega crush on you for months but didn’t want to say anything when you were still recovering from pretty much the worst thing that can happen to you at Summer Scouts.”

“Their friend is crushing right back,” Neptune says. “But all this honesty is giving her hives.”

Jupiter smiles. “Maybe we should go back to kissing, then.”

They do.


	3. Venus

For a moment in the woods, Venus sees everything. For the next months, she spends all of her time trying to forget. But you can’t unsee what you’ve seen, or undiscover  what you’ve realized, and now she’s stuck with uncomfortable personal realizations and the even more uncomfortable knowledge that Jupiter and Neptune knew this about Venus before she did.

Being the devil was the most  _ right _ Venus had ever felt, even if it had also felt wrong in a new way. The heat had burned, and the light had burned her eyes, but the new body had fit in a way her normal body didn’t. It’s so much harder now that she knows what’s wrong. She almost wishes she could go back to July, when she just had a vague sense of not-fitting-in and a deeply-buried envy instead of this bone-deep wrongness.

She hides from Jupiter and Neptune for as long as she can. She doesn’t want to face their worry and pity and  _ knowing _ , and she doesn’t want to push in on what she could see was forming between them. They wouldn’t want her, poor awkward Venus, forcing her way back into being friends with them. But there are all these words bubbling up inside her, all these things she can’t talk about except with the two who were there in the woods on a hot summer night when she let the devil in.

So she faces her fears and stops avoiding Jupiter and Neptune. It’s awkward at first, but the kind of awkward that passes quickly, like ripping off a band-aid of stilted conversation and mandatory concern.

“You doing all right?” Jupiter asks, snapping her hairband against her wrist.

“Better than I was,” Venus answers. “Sometimes I wake up and my skin feels like it’s burning, and it takes a while to shake off the lights in my eyes and the heat, but at least I’m not dead?”

“I’m pretty happy you’re still around.” Neptune isn’t very good at sympathy, but Venus doesn’t really want sympathy right now, so it all works out.

“So am I.” Venus shrugs. “And…you guys know, right? About how I’m a girl. Or at least not a boy. I mean, I don’t know—” It’s terrifying, to say it out loud. She can’t stop babbling.

“We kinda figured it out.” Jupiter smiles. “It’s all good.”

“It’s kind of not, though? I want so much, I’m jealous of so much, and that’s what let the devil in. You saw me, how I was when I just gave in and admitted what I wanted. I would have set the world on fire to get it. I’m bad, and I don’t deserve your sympathy.”

“Honestly, fuck that.” Neptune looks angry, but not angry at Venus. “If taking what we want makes us evil, maybe we should just be evil. Because you deserve to be happy, Venus, and you deserve to get what you want.”

Venus’s skin burns, but not like it did that night in the woods. “What if what I want, besides all of that, is something I absolutely can’t have? What if I want you, or Jupiter, or both of you?” It comes out in a rush, before she can think twice about it. Two confessions in one day is too many, and no matter how fine Jupiter and Neptune were with the first, they’ll hate Venus for this one.

But they share a knowing look instead, and then Jupiter says, “What makes you think you can’t have that?”

Venus laughs. “Don’t make fun of me. You already have each other.”

Neptune shrugs. “Two girlfriends isn’t worse than one girlfriend. And don’t let this go to your head, Venus, but you’re kind of cute.”

“Not that we’ve talked about it,” Jupiter added. “Just, you know, neither of us is averse to dating you. We might even have been hoping you would ask someday.”

“Um, this was not how I was expecting this conversation to go.” Venus can’t keep from grinning. “Are we dating, then?”

They both kiss Venus, one on each cheek.

“Yeah, idiot,” Neptune says. “We’re dating.”


End file.
